Back to School: ICP Education, a Magnet for Global Photo and New Media Studies

There is nothing better for an emerging imagemaker looking to advance in a crowded field than the fresh insights and valuable contacts to be gained from a photographic portfolio review. Earlier this year, I was invited to the annual Portfolio Day organized by New York’s International Center of Photography (ICP) to view the work of select alumni and current graduates.

ICP’s one-year certificate programs in Creative Practices, Documentary Practice & Visual Journalism, and New Media Narratives offer an intensive learning environment for motivated students within a wide range of age and cultural demographics. And given ICP’s New York location, these programs are a magnet for students with an international scope. This made me curious to learn about the effects of such an educational melting pot on students, so I followed up with two reviewees from my 20-minute sessions, whose combined perspectives offer a broad view of the international student experience.

Above photograph courtesy of ICP © Nicole Garcia

Beijing-native Jiawei Zhao is a 2016 graduate of ICP’s Creative Practices program, while Costa Rica-born Julian Jimsa is a 2019 graduate of ICP’s New Media Narratives program. Zhao went on to earn an MFA from Pratt Institute in 2018, and to be awarded several important artist residencies. He is currently applying for an O-1 Visa, granted to individuals who demonstrate extraordinary ability in their given field.

After finishing his studies in June 2019, Julian Jimsa is pursuing work opportunities that revolve around Interactive Experience Design through the U.S government’s Optional Practical Training (OPT) program, which allows international students to practice their skills in the United States for up to 12 months during or after completion of their academic programs.

Creating Alternatives to Community and the Comforts of Home

Jiawei Zhao first came to the United States from Beijing, in 2009, to study English as a Second Language, before earning a Bachelor of Business Administration degree from Southern Methodist University, in Dallas, Texas. “Without the experience of studying in the States, I would expect myself to be an engineer or scientist,” he says. “I was supposed to continue my accounting career in Dallas, but I realized I could make a much greater contribution to society as a visual artist.”

Zhao’s photographs and installation projects are greatly influenced by his personal experience as an international student, as well as that of some 350,000 other young Chinese students currently enrolled in academic institutions in the United States. “Chinese students are sandwiched between Chinese culture and American culture, and they have been building their own cultural identity,” he explains.

Working with a FUJIFILM GFX 50S medium format camera with GF 63mm f/2.8 R WR and GF 45 mm f/2.8 R WR lenses, Zhao’s earliest work was a portrait series of fellow students in their college settings. “They were all art school students who are originally from China and came here for education,” he notes. “I became so interested in portraits when I studied at ICP. I love to document their life, and their personalities.”

As young people in their early 20s living in a foreign land, Zhao describes his subjects as being “all lost somewhere,” which he also found to be true of himself at that time. “When I made this work, I could see myself through these portraits. Photography is the best way to help me communicate with my friends, to learn about their experiences, and their difficulties. My relationships became much stronger because I helped them cope with their anxieties through the image-making process.”

In a subsequent series, titled Flat Gold, Zhao takes a more conceptual approach to exploring community and the comforts of home. He begins by reviving a common practice in China from some 40 years ago, which involved pasting newspapers on the walls of one’s home as a handy and affordable solution for wallpaper.

Using pages from the New York Times as a base layer, he then hangs other objects on top—promotional calendars, red “chunlian” scrolls and decorations traditionally used during Chinese New Year, tourist photos of famous monuments or architectural sites appropriated from the Internet, and framed photographs from family albums—to reference the dualities of cultural assimilation and displacement. The collaged surface is then re-photographed to be presented as a flat piece of art on a gallery wall.

In another series, titled Dragon, Zhao drapes large photographic prints of walls and architectural façades across the foreground of a room to create cubist-inspired compositions. Areas of solid color and metallic reflection surrounding the photographs further complicate the sense of space. In the center of the composition, the three-dimensional structure of a door frame appears to lead out to a hallway, funneling the eye to the back of the room. Channeling the French aesthetic concept of the “flaneur,” Zhao describes his intent with this work, “I stroll around virtual and real space, and make critical points concerning ‘temporality’ by intertwining fake and real spatial relationships that mix photography, architecture, and obscured realities.”

In his most recent work, titled Their Own Wall Space, Zhao interrupts the orderly landscape of a college campus with literal walls of bricks, as well as crumpled paper laden with Chinese characters and images reminiscent of his Flat Gold series. “Recycling is always happening in my process,” he says.

After photographing the crumbled paper in this campus setting, Zhao prints the images for use in constructing a temporary wall space with bricks, which are made of soil dug from the campus. He views such efforts at image making as a way to decolonize existing structures. “Chinese students could have created an open-minded wall space for a big picture of American culture, or they could seal themselves off for safety through the wall spaces constructed to keep their own value conception and culture intact,” he explains.

According to Zhao, while most Chinese students will return to their native country after their studies are done, neither China or the U.S. will be a good fit for their future, due to compromises to their Chinese cultural heritage and cultural value shifts that occur through assimilation to everyday life in America. By mixing photography and sculptural processes in his work, Zhao aims to comment on such cultural shifting, while also “creating an actual architecture for their own comforts and community.”

Harnessing New Media Tools to Explore the Frontiers of Contemporary Art

As noted earlier, Julian Jimsa came to New York from his native Costa Rica to study and expand his knowledge in visual storytelling. While he has always been inclined toward the arts, especially cinema and filmmaking, his decision to study art did not come until after he received a Business degree.

“My journey into the art world has been quite different from what can be considered a ‘standard’ approach,” he explains. “I got a job in the Design department of a Costa Rican tech startup, where I learned a lot about graphic design. During that time, I also received a technical degree in photography from the Universidad Veritas. Then I started working in the photo and video industry.”

After two terms of photo studies in Costa Rica, Jimsa was accepted to ICP’s New Media Narratives program, moving to New York, in September 2018, to attend.

 

“There is a very tangible contrast between my country of origin and New York, and this really pushed me to explore the city that had just become my new home,” he explains. “New York is a city of huge contrasts, of constant noise, and billboards; where everybody is in a rush. But after a while, I discovered a special part of the city that only a few people talk about.”

This exploration inspired him to make the short film Wave Lengths, “trying to show a different representation of The City that Never Sleeps, by presenting movement only through music and lights.”

Starting from South Ferry, at the tip of Manhattan, Jimsa traversed the city to the Upper West Side, recording key moments with his Sony a7 III with Sony 24-105mm F4 G OSS and Sony FE 18-35mm 2.8 GM lenses, and a Manfrotto 290 XTRA tripod with 804 3-Way Pan/Tilt head.

“I was paying attention to the quietness of the city at night, he points out. “There is a moment in New York where everything stops, where the city is finally quiet, and you can even hear a whisper. Since I was exploring a side of the city that was foreign to me, recording Wave Lengths was an incredibly eye-opening process.”

Jimsa’s studies in ICP’s New Media Narratives program offered him a very different learning experience than his previous studies in Costa Rica. “ICP’s approach was more focused on the new mediums and tools being born with the quick advancements of technology,” he notes. “The program had a great variety of classes that challenged my perspective of the art world and the tools that are used to create art. I definitely had an affinity for everything related to new media and working with technology as a way of artistic expression.”

Early in his studies, Jimsa focused on photographing the two contradicting aspects of the city—its concrete jungle and the elements of nature found in parks and on the streets. “After seeing the two bodies of work together, I decided to combine them into one, creating a piece called Symbiosis that reacts to the music and sounds of the environment it’s in.”

Working on his MacBook Pro 15-inch laptop with 2.6 GHz Intel® Core i7™, he used Module 8 VJ software to mix the images. “Depending on the sounds and music playing in the room, the photographs morph and mix,” he explains, “changing color and shape to create a hybrid between nature and man-made structures.”

When it came time for Jimsa’s graduation project, he applied his studies of coding and virtual reality to his own life experiences, creating the VR experience Inner Tree, which allows the viewer to explore different stages in the process of enlightenment.

“This piece has a very special significance for me,” he says. “Having been raised by an agnostic father and a Buddhist/Catholic mother, I’ve always had two conflicting ideas of how to see the world. Inner Tree became a way for me to understand what spiritual people are striving towards, and to embrace a part of me that I constantly neglect.”

As Jimsa explains about this project, “Working with VR was a completely new challenge for me, since the scope of the project was really big. The process began with a great amount of research on different belief systems and ideas of enlightenment,” he adds. “I took inspiration from Kabbalistic and Hermetic principles, as well as different concepts from Buddhism and Tibetan meditation.”

After that, his hard tasks involved writing the script, sound-designing the experience, creating the four worlds that viewers see, and coding different interactions within each world. Working on an Alienware m17 Gaming Laptop, he used a wide mix of software in the design process: Unity as a game engine, Blender for 3D modeling, Visual Studio Code for writing the necessary code, and various software from Adobe Creative Suite, especially Audition. “It was an incredible amount of work but, thankfully, there were always extra hands willing to help,” he notes. One collaborator was artist Julie Vogel, who provided a narration for the piece. “I used a Zoom H4n Pro digital multitrack recorder to capture her voice,” he says.

“When wearing an HTC Vive VR System for full immersion, each person will experience the piece in a slightly different way,” Jimsa adds. “Hopefully, this allows the viewer to reflect on the importance of introspective, spiritual practices, rather than focusing solely on an external search for answers.”

Educational Takeaways

Jimsa had two significant takeaways from his ICP experience. “First, it has been an opportunity to learn and work with such a vast variety of people coming from different countries, backgrounds and cultures,” he says. “This is by far the most mind-expanding aspect of the whole program. Every friend and colleague you make has a different way of interpreting their world and, in consequence, your work. This constantly makes you discover new ways of seeing your projects. Second is the understanding of the importance that stories have to our world,” Jimsa notes.

“At the end of the day I deeply believe that our reality is defined by the stories we constantly tell ourselves, making the power of storytelling something not to be taken lightly. Being part of ICP’s New Media program helped me to understand a great variety of different mediums, and to learn how to tell effective stories on each one of them. This is of great use when deciding which medium to use to enhance the stories I want to share.”

As for Zhao, who entered the program without professional photography skills, or the understanding of how to build a cohesive body of work, he says, “The school and my teachers helped me to become a fine art photographer. ICP’s certificate program is open to all kinds of photographers,” he adds, “but it is ideal for photographers like me who do not have a lot of skills and experience.”

Learn more about the International Center of Photography’s education programs on its website or check out its Instagram feeds @icp, @icp_creative_practices, @icp_docit, @icp_nmn, @icpbardmfa.

Have you studied in one of ICP’s certificate programs or taken a workshop? If so, tell us about it in the Comments section, below.